Great short stories

A college acquaintance of mine, with whom I have not kept in touch, but who consistently manufactures witty Facebook statuses, recently posted a list of some of her favorite short stories. I looked 'em up and found links. Internet!

J D. Salinger: A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Philip Roth: The Conversion of the Jews

Raymond Carver: A Small, Good Thing

Amy Hempel: In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

Tobias Wolff - Bullet in the Brain

Lorrie Moore: People Like That are the Only People Here

Ray Bradbury: The Veldt

Christopher Hitchens and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Christopher Hitchens was a pretty reasonable dude - definitely no shill for either side of the aisle. Check it out if you like; this essay about Ayaan Hirsi Ali is particularly relevant today. Hitchens agrees with the same 95% of Hirsi Ali's rhetoric that I do, particularly regarding freedom of expression and human rights. But there's more - her stance on Islam is at times reactionary and frankly a bit paranoid, and she espouses some scary infringements on the rights of Muslims in the Netherlands and the US. It's rare to disagree so strongly with someone I consider this brilliant.

Then again, there's her observation that here in the west, we tend to project our liberal values where they don't necessarily belong. Is the following position worth considering, at least, before we dismiss it as racist?

"But I don’t even think that the trouble is Islam. The trouble is the West, because in the West there’s this notion that we are invincible and that everyone will modernize anyway, and that what we are seeing now in Muslim countries is a craving for respect. Or it’s poverty, or it’s caused by colonization.

The Western mind-set—that if we respect them, they’re going to respect us, that if we indulge and appease and condone and so on, the problem will go away—is delusional."

Albert Einstein's extraordinary brain

The most striking feature of Albert Einstein's brain is that the sylvian fissure ends abruptly as it progresses posteriorly, running straight into the postcentral sulcus. This means he didn't have a parietal operculum: the brain region responsible for higher-order somatosensory processing. As a result, his inferior parietal lobule, responsible for abstract spatial reasoning, was proportionally enlarged.

To see this for yourself, look at figure 1c below. The sylvian fissure is the horizontal groove running from the front (right) of the brain towards the back. Notice how, about a third of the way back, it turns up sharply. The resulting vertical groove is the postcentral sulcus, often an entirely separate structure.

Compare that to a more typical brain, where the sylvian fissure is much longer (but, in this case, still contiguous with the postcentral sulcus:

I don't see why this would matter, or if it even stands up to familywise error correction, but Einstein also had a low neuron:glia ratio in his left angular gyrus, part of the temporoparietal junction, an area involved in understanding other people's mental states.

Lay article

Scholarly article (pdf)

Hay

We saw some of this stuff at a construction site on the walk back from dinner. I pointed it out, and the following conversation ensued:

Me: Hay.
Meaghan: What is it?
Me: *points*
Meaghan: Oh, hay!
Me: Heeeyyyy...

Dinosaur comics on justice

Because justice is meaningless when morality is relative and good is unquantifiable! Or something.

Atheist could face a year in prison for disrupting school board's prayer

Article

We are quite literally at war, and the battle is nearly at my doorstep (Bartow, FL is two hours from where I grew up).

Scary stuff.

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love

I Am a Zombie Filled with Love is both a surprisingly poignant love story and a harrowing commentary on human sexuality and society. It's also a philosophical musing with undertones of both French existentialism and Buddhist anti-solipsism. Additionally, zombies.